


would anything matter

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [12]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Hurt No Comfort, Mechtober, Trans Character, Unhealthy Relationships, Vampires, Whumptober 2020, broken trust, not found family so much as shoddily constructed family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:08:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26983399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: After her third airlocking, Carmilla can no longer claim that her presence is wanted on the Aurora.(Whumptober Day 12: broken trust; Mechtober Day 10-12: vampires)
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & The Mechanisms Ensemble
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 13
Kudos: 73
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	would anything matter

After her third airlocking, Carmilla can no longer claim that her presence is _wanted_ on the Aurora.

She finds her way back, of course, but only because she’d rather drift through space in a hauler than completely unmoored. There are some items in her lab that she’d rather not leave anywhere near her creations, as well. Thankfully, as sour as their relationship has become, Aurora doesn’t alert anyone else to her presence when Carmilla heads directly for her lab.

Aurora will be the hardest to leave, she thinks.

If any of her children could be described as the forgiving type, it would be Aurora, though it’d still be a stretch. After all, she has to be forgiving to put up with the constant barrage of bullets and explosions and fires and still, through it all, stay so deeply in love with her crew. At the same time, she’s a fiercely protective creature, and in retrospect, Carmilla thinks that any remaining love between the two of them was doomed as soon as she brought Nastya on board. Aurora’s silence is a nice gesture, but ultimately, she knows that this is the end for her family.

**Do you want me to inform the Mechanisms that you’re on board?**

Carmilla sighs at the sound of Aurora’s voice coming from overhead. She’s currently leaning on a lab bench, packing up a small box of vials containing samples too important to abandon, while Aurora hems and haws in her own mechanical way. “I’d rather you not.”

**I understand. I assumed as much, but communication is important.**

“Sure, because we’re all going to start communicating _now.”_ She tapes the box shut and drops it onto the seat of her wheelchair, then moves on to the nearest filing cabinet, which contains her most essential notes. “They don’t want me here. I won’t weigh them down with pointless goodbyes.”

Aurora doesn’t respond to that, and Carmilla goes about her work in silence, watching the documents and glassware stack up on the seat of her wheelchair. She won’t let herself take any more than she can push; the rest can stay with them. If anything, they might need her notes to do repairs on themselves, since their mechanisms aren’t nearly as flawless as they seem to think. “I think I’m going to go home,” she murmurs.

**Terra?**

The excitement in Aurora’s voice pierces something deep under Carmilla’s skin, and it floods her with muddy-thick guilt. “If I can find it.”

**I hope you do.**

The starship’s voice is genuine, and for a moment, Carmilla wonders if she means that as well-wishing or as a curse. Immortality aside, Terra isn’t exactly a pleasant place to be after all the planet has been through, and Aurora knows as well as her that the memories attached will be… difficult.

She finishes with the file cabinet and turns to examine the pile of things she’s bringing with her. It feels lackluster, worthless, given that she can’t actually take a scrap of the humanity she’s built here on the Aurora. Well, _built_ implies that she was the one to create it—and she was, in a way, in giving her Mechanisms a second chance, but she certainly never made any of them _more_ human.

Once again, she thinks of the desperate vastness of space, and she wants to scream.

**Brian is coming this way.**

Carmilla blinks a few times, then starts pushing her wheelchair full of stuff toward the door, leaning on it like a walker. “Thanks for the warning,” she offers, not that Aurora acknowledges her gratitude. When she gets to the door, she pauses to take a deep breath and school her face into something neutral. The guilt seeping through every inch of her marrow is hers alone. Brian deserves better than to have to see it.

The door slides open, and the Drumbot stands on the other side, eyes wide.

“Can I help you?” Carmilla asks, already pushing past him. She had wanted to apologize, to be _kind_ in some way for once in her life, but just seeing his face brought out something callous in her that wouldn’t stay down where she stuffed it. “I’m just on my way out.”

Brian turns to follow her, keeping pace. “So you _have_ been getting back in on your own.”

“Of course I have. It’s my ship, after all.”

They both feel the way Aurora hums and shifts at that comment. “And you’re just… leaving now?”

Carmilla presses her lips together. “Yes. I can take a hint, eventually.”

Thankfully, none of the other Mechanisms find them on the way to the hauler, but Brian stays next to her the entire time, quiet and stolid. Carmilla is relieved; she’s not in a place to see Jonny or Nastya and make it out in one piece. When they arrive at last, Brian helps her push her wheelchair up the loading ramp, then turns to her with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Will we be seeing you again?”

That’s a harder question to answer. The universe is infinite, and her children are all over it, in time and space and narrative. “Hopefully not,” she replies after a moment.

She expects that to be a relief to Brian, but instead he looks panicked. “Wait, you… will you…”

“I can’t remove the switch, if that’s what you were hoping for,” she interrupts him. “It’s part of your mechanism. As permanent as the rest.”

His face hardens. “Figures.”

That word hits Carmilla like a dagger. She has no right to be hurt by Brian’s bitterness, not after the terrible cruelty of everything she made him into, and yet. “Would it help if I said I’m sorry?”

“No.”

She nods, claps him on the shoulder, and watches him step off the hauler with his hat pulled low over his eyes. And like that, she’s never going to see any of her children again. Better strange and anticlimactic than any other possibility, she figures, but she will miss them.

Gods, will she miss them.

Hours later, once the Aurora blinks out of sight amidst the endless stars, she breaks down. Curled on the floor under the control panel of the hauler, she sobs and trembles and fights for every breath, thinking of the family she dreamed up and the family she crafted from metal and stardust and her own bitterness. They hate her, and she understands. Half of them didn’t even understand what they were agreeing to when they were mechanized, much less the truth behind the motherly affection she offered; how were they to love her when she never gave them a choice? She presses a hand to her face so that she doesn’t have to look at the emptiness of this new ship, this space for her to suffer alone while they go about their lives without the constant weight of her anger.

Her anger, at least, is justified. A vampire’s memory lasts far longer than a human’s, so she remembers everything her father did to her, everything _Loreli_ did to her, and she knows that she’s right to rage. Her creations had plenty of fury in their own right, but despite Aurora’s massiveness, there was never enough room for all that anger to fizzle out, and it just swept into mad fiery tornadoes time and time again, catching every innocent bystander in its path. She clashed with Jonny, bent on stealing her authority out from under her nose—at first she had been insulted, but as she thinks of the look in his eyes the first time she returned, she knows that some part of him, no matter how conscious, wanted to keep his crew safe from her.

And he’s only the most abrasive of them. Nastya winced away from her touch, hid from her in the veins of her own starship, and yet when Carmilla stumbled out of her lab in the worst hours of the morning, combing the fridge for forgotten packets of blood, Nastya was there. Nastya looked at her with a depth in her glacial eyes, a recognition that opened something raw and festering under Carmilla’s skin. She heard the still-living princess say something about _all the things boys are allowed to do,_ she heard her own father say _I have no daughter,_ and when she collapsed into one of the chairs at the kitchen table that night, Nastya had leaned her head on her shoulder and said, without so many words, “I know. I know you.”

Carmilla knows without a shadow of a doubt that Nastya is happy to have her gone. That doesn’t change the fact that she would give anything to go back in time—not just that, but to reinvent herself, to be the kind of person who could rescue Anastasia Romanova and protect the gracious, trusting person she should’ve been. She would tear herself open at the seams and re-stitch every fiber of her being, if it would make her the chosen mother Nastya deserved.

She created immortality, but she still doesn’t have that power.

These thoughts continue for days. Carmilla lets the hauler drift as she wanders the cramped space, making sense of the few items she brought along with herself and putting lackluster effort into making the ship feel like her new home. It’s been used before, and there are bits and pieces of her family left behind: a discarded wrapper from Tim’s favorite crisps, an empty lighter, a few splinters of wood where someone must’ve done some damage to the Toy Soldier. She collects these things with the same reverence as her notes and samples, even if she knows that they’ll hurt her in the long run. And she thinks of what she’s leaving. Ivy and Ashes will keep them somewhat all sane, she hopes, even if they’re both suffering in their own right. Brian… she doesn’t have the right to cry for him, after everything she changed.

There’s a soft voice in the back of her head telling her that she has the ability, no matter how weak, to be better. That even if she can’t salvage what she had with the Mechanisms, she can make something better in the future. She wants to cling to that hope, but at the same time, it hurts to imagine her life without them.

It hurts to imagine her life at all, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> the notes for this one were just "generational trauma" but by day 12 my brain is entirely fried and I can't remember what I meant by that, and I'm pretty sure what I DID mean was just putting my actual human mother on blast via fanfic and that's too much for me to write atm. So I tried to get a lil bit poetic and mostly just watched lashings. And cried. Because nastya reminds me a lot of someone who was very important to me, but i wrecked that relationship by being an idiot, and uhhhh im projecting basically.
> 
> also i really want to explore more of the Trans Solidarity between nastya and carmilla because love between trans people is a uniquely powerful force, but i also feel like... i am never gonna truly understand the love between trans women so i can only try to imagine and cry.
> 
> mcr lyric titles yeehaw welcome to the year of our lord 2020 im just existing over here. i am on tumblr @alderations and i am having at least one emotion


End file.
